Organisational effectiveness refers to a value-based judgement concerning the performance of an organisation. It includes using different strategies and tools to achieve the organisation's goals. One of the tools used to achieve organisation effectiveness is employee engagement. Your human resource managers can help you improve your business by focusing on employee engagement.
Employee engagement is about the relationship between an organisation and its employees, whereby employees become devoted to the organisation they work for and are highly involved in their job with eagerness and passion for the success of the organisation (Markos & Sandhya Sridevi, 2010). There are some challenges concerning Employee Engagement in the work environment that your managers can tackle. The employee engagement challenges faced by some companies are attainable through understanding the elements of employee engagement. These are trait engagement, state engagement and behavioural engagement.
This article shall focus on how employee engagement helps ensure that the organisation flows better and works effectively. It will also briefly outline other ways of achieving organisational effectiveness for your company.
Trait Engagement
According to Macey and Schneider (2008), trait engagement refers to having positive views of life and work, which entails proactive personality, autotelic personality and conscientiousness. Your needs employees who have more proactive personalities, which means that employees will be change-oriented. Many companies are currently facing financial challenges that have resulted in them suffer from losses by going over budget, which shows that they failed to stick with their intended strategies. Having more proactive personalities will be helpful for your organisation because then there are more people focused on strictly following the budget and sticking to the given strategy. Having employees who are change-oriented would help bring in new ideas to improve the organisation. This will help your company move with the times and stay in business.
A challenge that some companies have is that of employees with autotelic personalities. This means that people will have many specific personality traits, which may make them put a lot of attention to many different activities simultaneously (Ross & Keiser, 2014). This may affect your employees’ ability to get work done. Such personalities may be the reason your company has struggled to stay in line with the set business strategy. This challenge is attainable by helping employees develop a good attitude towards their work, which will positively affect their behaviour. Yes, it is good for employees to multitask, however, ensure your managers do not overwhelm their workers because giving them too many activities because it will most likely lead them to delay the completion of certain projects.
Your company also will need conscientious employees who will do their work well and thoroughly. Such personality will bring more efficiency and order to the business. This would mean finding diligent employees who will remain dedicated to achieving the goals of the organisation.
State engagement
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State engagement refers to one's feelings towards their job (Macey & Schneider, 2008). Focusing on state engagement will help encourage employees to have positive attitudes towards the work they do. Your company may have received bad publicity from the media and your employees may have developed negative attitudes towards their work. Their attitudes can be made more positive through ensuring employees more involved, for example, with some of the decision makings. This may bring satisfaction to your workers and make them feel more empowered to work harder when they make decisions on their own.
Commitment speaks to the coming together or the binding of the organization with its employees (Macey & Schneider, 2008). Due to corruption, many organisations have issues of lack of trust amongst stakeholders, for instance, between the executives, the board and the employees. This has harmed the commitment of people. Your company can encourage employees to be more committed to their work by letting them know what areas they can improve in and give constant feedback. Putting an effort to fight corruption within your organisation may help your employees to stay committed as well and develop a positive attitude towards the organisation. This is significant because their attitudes towards work can improve employee engagement as well as improve your company’s publicity.
Behavioural engagement
According to Macey and Schneider (2008), behavioural engagement refers to workers’ participation and involvement in their work. This can be influenced by transformational leadership, which influences employees’ interests, improves self-actualisation and meets both the organisations and the employees need. Having transformational leaders in your organisation encourages organisational citizenship behaviour, which positively affects the functioning of your company. This means that your leaders will create an encouraging and comfortable environment that will lead to your workers voluntarily committing to your company. Expanding roles will help your organisation, as workers can learn to do more through job rotation and job enlargement, which will help them become more adaptive as well.
Other than employee engagement, other varying strategies can help you ensure organisational effectiveness for your company. This includes the use of the competing values model and Blue Ocean Strategy.
Your company’s organisational effectiveness can improve using the competing values model. The competing values model is a framework used to help an organisation be effective with four basic competing values, which are clan culture, adhocracy culture, hierarchical culture and market culture (Kokt & van der Merwe, 2009). By identifying your organisational culture, employees may find more value in the work and so work harder which will result in the organisation running efficiently and effectively.
Your organisation does not need to be limited to one culture throughout. There needs to be an organisational culture for the company as a whole, however, the different departments in your business can have different cultures, which are referred to as subcultures. Your organisation can have a clan culture overall, which is flexible and internally focused. However, your finance and marketing department may have a market culture or a hierarchical one. Choose what works for you and what will help you function more effectively.
Another way of making sure that your company runs more efficiently is by the blue ocean strategy. The blue ocean strategy is when an organisation creates a new demand without using other competition to benchmark itself (Kim & Mauborgne, 2005). For example in the airline industry, instead of using jet fuel, your airline could invest in aircraft with built-in solar panels that will power the plane. The jet fuel can become the backup source. This will help you cut costs and give your company a competitive advantage. The competitive advantage will lead to the organisation being more effective.
Remember to do what works for your company and your employees to achieve effectiveness.
References
Kim, C., & Mauborgne. (2005). Blue ocean strategy: From theory to practice. California Management Review, 47(3), 105-121.
Kokt, D., & van der Merwe, C. (2009). Using the competing values framework (CVF) ton investigate organisational culture in a major private security company. South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences, 12(3), 343-352.
Macey, W., & Schneider, B. (2008). The meaning of employee engagement. Industrial and Organisational Psychology, 1, 3-30.
Markos, S., & Sandhya Sridevi, S. (2010). Employee engagement: The key to improving performance. International Journal of Business and Management, 5(2), 89-96.
Ross, S., & Keiser, H. (2014). Autotelic personality through a five-factor lens: Individual differences in flow-propensity. Personality and Individual Differences, 59(1), 3-8.
Sifiso Dingani is a Consultant at Industrial Psychology Consultants (Pvt) Ltd, a management and human resources consulting firm. Phone +263 (242) 481946-48/481950 or cell number +263 775517211 or email: sifiso@ipcconsultants.com or visit our website at www.ipcconsultants.com